The Tide May Be Turning On Our Gun Culture

WASHINGTON — Sentiment about guns ebbs and flows in America, but the surge last April after Littleton, Colo., was unusual: With 14 kids and a teacher shot to death in school, laws bringing sanity to the nation's gun habit seemed within grasp.

But no. Congress has gone home, bearing no gun legislation at all. The National Rifle Association, overpowered only briefly by the burst of public engagement, is back in the saddle.

While it lasted, the post-Littleton activity was impressive. Limits on handgun purchases, an increase in the minimum age for possessing guns, bans on juvenile possession of semiautomatic assault rifles and an extension of Brady Law requirements to gun shows drew serious consideration. By June, the Senate had passed some tough provisions.

But by then, the NRA had revved up. It threw $1.5 million--and its inestimable membership--behind the opposition, and the great surge of post-Littleton gun-control hopes was throttled.

On the July day when 100 Denver-area high school students gathered on Capitol Hill to plead for a response to the tragedy that killed their friends and classmates, they'd already lost. Still, Rosa Chavez, 17, poignantly asked her congressman: "What's more important, the right for people to bear arms, or the right of people not to be killed?" She might have been comforted to find that the public knows the answer. According to The Washington Post, 65 percent of Americans think gun control is more important than the right to bear arms--up from 57 percent in 1993.

The NRA, however, has a different vision. In 1997, now-President Charlton Heston told a Washington audience that the right to own guns is "the one that protects all the others. . . . Among freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, of redress of grievances, it is the first among equals."

The NRA's evocation of the nation's founders and frontier forefathers is enough to make gun ownership sound like a patriotic duty. But Garry Wills' new book, "A Necessary Evil," sees history differently. We have far more guns per person today than did those supposedly arms-loving Revolutionary-era Americans. As for the frontier days, cattle towns were plagued with violence--and often responded by passing strict handgun bans that "cut homicide rates spectacularly."

No, writes Wills, America's gun culture was born later, after the Civil War--when the NRA was formed by two Union veterans. That we can't do what the frontiersmen did is thanks both to the NRA and to legislators who favor gun-control but favor political gain even more. There were Democrats happy to see moderate controls defeated--more hay to be made on the campaign trail.

Still, even as gun control failed, indicators have popped up here and there across the landscape showing that winds have shifted at last on this question. Suits by cities charging handgun-makers with negligence are having an effect in and outside the courts. Gunmakers have parted ranks with the NRA, saying (for example) that locks on guns aren't such a bad idea after all. Colt Manufacturing--inventor of the six-shooter--decided this fall to get out of the retail handgun business; fear of legal liability was a likely motivation.

By 2001, gunfire injury is expected to pass motor vehicle injury as the leading cause of traumatic death in the United States, according to the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Life without fear is not what arms-bearing offered those Littleton kids--or their friends, who came to Washington yearning for some moderation of our gunslinging. Happily, it seems they'll be seeing some.

But not from Congress, where the NRA, befriended by complacency, rides again.